site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

8
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

We judge it based on our priors. If we have two alternative explanations to explain the same set of facts, we choose the explanation that is more likely based on our prior belief. If it's wet outside, it could be that it rained, or it could be that a forest fighting helicopter dropped their bucket of water by mistake. Both explanations fit the facts, but the rain explanation is more likely cause our priors of rain occurring are much higher than a forest fighting helicopter dropped their bucket of water by mistake.

Yeah, but in that analogy the firefighting department predicted rain, said it'd look as if one of their helicopters dropped its bucket but it'll be rain. 5 minutes before it was wet outside, the sun was shining, the sky was blue and completely cloudless. All weather stations in the areas in question stopped reporting the weather at the same time, then deleted the records of the raw instrument data as fast as they could after the event, so any and all subsequent attempts to reconstruct the weather are done with already processed and edited data, and there's even a video of firefighting helicopters flying erratically over Atlanta.

Now none of this is actual proof, but I would not blame anyone for believing shenanigans happened.

This seems to be boiling down a disagreement on our priors on election fraud likelihood, like with many other people replying. I do not agree with that analogy of what it was like before the election. Adjusting the analogy, I would say it would be like the weather man saying "Firefighting helicopters are continuing to fly over area A to get to the forest fire, but lucky for us in area B, we won't have to deal with them flying over us (analogous to there being fraud, but not significant fraud). Expect scattered sun showers (analogous to setting expectations for the 'red mirage') and low visibility from all the ash in the air (analogous to the info environment making it hard to tell what it true or not in the moment and afterwards).

then deleted the records of the raw instrument data as fast as they could after the event

responding to this specifically since I see it brought up a lot. I can't interpret this fact without also knowing how normal it is to do such a thing. Is it a normal practice? What is the reason for not storing it? Maybe there's a good reason, maybe not. Maybe it's best practice and storing data has been tried but they changed it for a good reason. Who knows. Without context, I can't really interact with that info. It's like if you told me "Bob doesn't save his receipts when he goes the grocery store! Something fishy is happening", then we obviously know that it is no big deal. But, the only reason we know that is that we have the context of it being extremely common for people to not save their receipts, so Bob not saving them as well isn't notable.